.. . II ,t ........r1'1 · ': . I I -: . I I I , I . . I · I I' I I I . . - . I I - . . , . . i . , . THE CRITICS . I , I I . I . --7- 7 -::::::\). , .... -\ - - - , '" -- , ,,'. "," ,/ / -."'I ....'" ... ... ,----- o BOOKS PA50LIN I: A 5TAR ON FIRE by ClzveJames R NAISSANCE MAN is a descrip- tion tossed around too lightly in modern times-actors get it If they can play the guitar-but for Pier Paolo Pasolini nothing less will do. From the moment he hit Rome after the Second World War until the mo- ment his own car hit him in 1975, Pasolini single-handedly reëmbodled about half the personnel of Burckhardt's "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy." He was poet, novelist, scholar, intellectual, sexual adven- turer, reforming zealot, creator of large-scale visual spectaculars-and all these things equally. To make a comparable impact, Raphael would have had to be elected Pope. To make a comparable exit, Michel- angelo would have had to fall out of the Sistine Ceiling. Pasolini was a front-page event in every field he en- tered, including death. A boy he picked up in his A1fa Romeo sports car ran him over with it and left him helpless in the dust. Beat that, Re- naissance! Not even Cola di Rienw got trampled by his own horse. Pasolini's sensational demise hap- pened at Ostia, once the port where Julius Caesar took ship and Cleo- patra came ashore. The ancient location widens Pasolini's frame of reference still further, to include the whole of Italian history. He was such o a national figure that it becomes easy to lose sight of the individual. In a new biography ("Pasolini Re- quiem"; Pantheon; $35) Barth David Schwartz mercifully doesn't, but his whopping book isn't helped by the bad practice of cramming in all the inciden- tal research to prove that it has been done. European reviewers like to call this an American habit, but really it is a virus with no respect for borders. A more specific stricture to place on Mr. Schwartz mIght be that a prose style so devoid of verve is no fit instrument to ) '>.. vA .f Æ La Malavita: Pasolini spent so much time in the lower depths because he found them ethically preferable to the heIghts. 179 " I , I , , II I /1 ,... . I I . ) _,!f .- . . evoke a hero who crackled with energy even when he was being stupid. But Mr. Schwartz, though a plodder, plods briskly enough to make his subject breathe, and some of the specialized knowledge was well worth going to get. In addition to his prodigious archival burrowings and the conducting of inter- views on the scale of a door-to-door electoral canvass, Mr. Schwartz seems to have acquainted himself personally with the sexually ambiguous (though unambiguously violent) Roman low life that was Pasolini's stamping ground, or prancing ground. The biographer is to be congratulated not least for coming out alive. The biographee, after all, got killed in there. As for what he was doing in there, the first answer is obvious: he was cruis- ing, although that word understates his predatory celerity. Better to say that he was pouncing. <21l1ck off the mark and dressed to kill, he was a cheetah in dark glasses. In the borgata, the slumland of the Roman periphery, the population was mosdy immigrants from the south who had come in search of prosperity and found misery. Petty theft and casual prostitution made up most of their economy. For a well-heeled and vora- ciously promiscuous homosexual like Pasolini, it was a dream come true. There were boys to be had for a pack of cigarettes or just a ride in his car. He did his best to have them all. It remains astonishing, when you look at the shelf of books and rack of films signed with his name, that he found the energy to copulate even more prolifically than he created. People who knew him well were astonished, too. On location in North Mrica for a film, his colleagues would retire exhausted to their tents af- ter a long day and meet him coming out of his, all set to cruise the dunes. But the spontaneous and seemingly